Killing Chickens in a Wood Chipper Discussed in The Canadian Veterinary JournalAn Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Canadian Veterinary Medical Journal Volume 45, January 2004
Ethical question of the month - October 2003

Recent correspondence in a veterinary journal has concerned the use of a
wood chipper to dispose of laying hens following the end of the production
cycle or as an emergency measure in the case of an exotic disease outbreak.
It is likely that such a device kills birds instantly. Is there anything
wrong with such a practice?

An ethicist's commentary on using wood chippers to kill chickens

Some years ago, I experienced a situation exemplifying the flip side of
the issue facing us. While visiting another country, I had a meeting with
the executive board of the group representing equine veterinarians in that
country. We discussed many ethical issues facing equine medicine in our
respective countries, and eventually engaged the issue of euthanasia for
injury at the racetrack. I was horrified to learn that their veterinarians
dispatched such animals with succinylcholine, a paralytic depolarizing the
neuro-muscular junction, resulting in an agonizing terrifying death by
suffocation via paralysis of the diaphragm. Through I am not clear whether
or not these practitioners understood what was going on physiologically,
they defended their practice on aesthetic grounds, since the public did not
wish to witness gunshot, in fact, a far more humane procedure.

Now we are discussing a procedure that is allegedly humane, involving
instant death, but one which is as aesthetically disturbing as could be. If
it is true that the animals do no suffer, the chicken euthanasia is far
superior to the equine one just described, but it is still problematic.

Though not definitive, public sensibilities are highly relevant to
methods of euthanasia. Not only must euthanasia create quick and painless
death; it must not shock, horrify, or brutalize practitioners or observers.
The problem with using the chipper is that it violates the latter set of
concerns. As one of my students put it, "It may not hurt the animals, but it
certainly hurts people." How so? Because it is horrible to observe and
surely desensitizing to those who do it. We must ask ourselves, would we do
it to companion animals? Would we allow our children to watch it? Would
society accept it as a method of capital punishment if one could demonstrate
scientifically the instantaneous loss of consciousness?"

It is bad enough that industrialized agriculture has commodified animals
and replaced husbandry with industry. Should we now further evidence a view
of animals that sees them as logs to be chipped? And in an ironic reversal
of the horse situation, where it never even occurs to the public that the
animals are not going to sleep peacefully, the public will never believe
that being ground up alive doesn't hurt, thereby further eroding the image
of agriculture in the public mind, and further potentiating the social
demand for legislated regulation of agriculture.

I write with regard to Dr. Rollin's commentary on using wood chippers to
kill chickens (Can Vet J 2004; 45:9 [January 2004]). Dr. Rollin appears to
be unaware of how the hens in the San Diego County wood-chipping episode
actually died.

The affidavits contained in the San Diego County Department of Animal
Services' report explain that, in that episode, combinations of live and
dead chickens, hundreds at a time, were tossed and piled into the bucket of
a front-end loader tractor and that inside the chipper a hydraulic ram
pushed the chickens toward a pair of large feed wheels that crushed them and
fed them into a pulverizing device by means of a large number of rapidly
rotating metal hammers. The chickens went into the machinery every which
way: head, breast, wings, legs, and beak.

In his commentary, Dr. Rollin quotes a "student" in suggesting that a
method that hurts animals more, but less obviously to human sensibilities,
may be preferable to a less inhumane death that "hurts" (offends) humans
aesthetically. The purport of his letter seems to be that the ethics of how
(and why) we kill animals is more about public relations, wishes, and
perceptions than about how an animal actually dies at our hands. In the case
of the wood-chipper killings, it isn't only that the hens were treated like
logs and that the manner of their death was ugly. The hens and how they
experienced being killed are the primary issues, along with the ethical
breach of conduct and oath violation of the veterinarians involved.

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